The Chessmen Read Free

‘He’s going to want to examine the body in situ , and we’ll get the whole scene photographed.’ He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘It’s going to be in all the papers, Mr Macleod. Bloody press’ll be flying in like vultures. Aye, and the brass, too. From Inverness. Wouldn’tsurprise me if it was the high heid yins themselves. They just love to stand in front of the cameras and see their wellfed faces on the telly.’ He paused, then, before turning to push the door shut. ‘Tell me, Mr Macleod. What makes you think that Roddy Mackenzie was murdered?’
    ‘I’d rather not say, George. I don’t want to prejudice your interpretation of the scene. I think it’s an assessment you should make for yourself.’
    ‘Fair enough.’ Gunn dropped into his chair and swivelled around so that he was facing Fin. ‘What the hell were you and Whistler Macaskill doing up in the mountains in a storm anyway, Mr Macleod?’
    ‘It’s a long story, George.’
    Gun raised his arms to interlock his fingers behind his head. ‘Well, we’ve got time to kill before the pathologist’s plane arrives . . .’ He let his sentence hang. Fin’s cue. And Fin realized it was only a couple of days since he and Whistler had been reunited for the first time in half a lifetime. Already it seemed like an eternity.

CHAPTER THREE
    I
    It had been an Indian summer, the long, hot dry spell stretching well into September, a rare phenomenon on this most northerly island of the Outer Hebrides. The furthest north and west you could go in Europe, the Isle of Lewis was burned brown by months of summer sun and unaccustomed weeks without rain. And still the weather was holding.
    It had taken Fin nearly two hours to drive from Ness down the west coast to Uig that day. From as far north as Siadar, Fin had seen the mountains rising out of the south-west towards Harris, a dark brooding purple cut against the palest of blue skies. It was the only point on any horizon where the clouds still lingered. Not threatening but just there, drifting among the peaks. The yellow bloom of wild tormentil grew among the bracken, lending a hint of gold to a landscape in which even the heather was bleached of colour. The tiny petals dipped and bowed in the stiffening breeze that blew in off the ocean, carrying with it the smell of the sea and a distant whiff of winter.
    On this first day of his new life, Fin reflected on just how much it had changed in little more than eighteen months. Back then he had been married, with a son, a life in Edinburgh, a job as a detective in ‘A’ Division CID. Now he had none of those things. He had come back to the womb, the island of his birth, but he wasn’t sure why. In search of who he had once been, perhaps. The only thing he knew for certain was that the change was irrevocable, and had begun the day a driver took the life of his little boy in an Edinburgh street and failed to stop.
    As he rounded the head of Loch Ròg Beag, Fin turned his mud-spattered Suzuki four-by-four off the single-track road on to a broken metalled path without passing places. Past a clutch of Highland cattle with their long, curling horns and shaggy brown coats, to follow the river upstream towards a puddle of a loch where, unusually, trees grew in the shelter of a fold of hills, and Suaineabhal Lodge stood in the shadow of their protection.
    It was a long while since Fin had seen Kenny John Maclean. Big Kenny had left the island with the rest of them. But his life had taken an altogether different course. He lived now in an old crofthouse that had been extended and modernized, and sat on the far side of the path opposite the lodge. A rabble of dogs came barking out of a tin-roofed barn as Fin pulled up in the parking area. The lodge itself was based upon an old farmhouse, and when Sir John Wooldridge had first bought the Red River Estate he had built out side and back, and appended a conservatory at the front that looked out over the loch. Unlike Cracabhal Lodge